


This can't possibly go wrong, can it?

by FallingNarwhals



Category: The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: "What if some details were altered", Angst and Humor, Gen, Humor, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, WHO DO YOU THINK DIES?????? I SURE WONDER, abuse of science, aka i take my spacecamp nerdiness and apply it to fanfic, theres character death in a few of em
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-25
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-19 01:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11303094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallingNarwhals/pseuds/FallingNarwhals
Summary: One-shot collection. If certain events in the book didn't happen, would Mark Watney still survive?The answer: Yes. Most of the time.All science and abuse of science is explained.Chapter one: Whiteout in communications and Nigerian Basket weaving.





	1. Whiteout and Nigerian Basket Weaving (Sol 104 to 117)

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: A whiteout occurs when the Earth is between Mars and the Sun and the amount of communication makes it impossible to communicate with Earth up to fourteen days (Sixteen Sols)

**Log Entry: Sol 104**

 

Now that NASA can talk to me, they won’t shut the hell up. Which makes this recent radio silence from them a huge mystery.

 

I took apart Pathfinder and put it back together, running diagnostics on every little thing. Nothing should be wrong with it, but NASA doesn’t answer any emails from me.

 

They have a room full of people trying to micromanage my crops, too, which means that they need the constant communication from my side and theirs. I mostly ignored them, but now I’m scrolling through their emails taking their advice. They’re telling me, the best botanist on this fucking planet, how to grow potatoes.

 

In 10 sols, I’ll have to harvest and reseed my potatoes. They’re growing quite well. Turns out having a stable environment and the perfect amount of martian made water makes them huge. The ones I had for my first seed were barely the size of my palm, but the ones I’m planning to eat are huge!

 

I also have four hundred potato plants, and to reseed them I’ll be taking the smaller of the potatoes and replanting them, uprooting the plant. The greens of the plants are safe to eat in low qualities, so I’ll store them outside and eat one plant every seven sols. With that extra boost that’ll get my calorie count up, but probably won’t be enough to get me an extra couple sols. Think of it like a vitamin pill that could kill me if I take more than one. I’ll get wicked stomachaches, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

 

In the meantime, I send daily status reports to NASA even though they aren’t answering. I figured that there might be something wrong with JPL or their own communications, or hell, maybe the orbits are just weird.

 

I’ll do some digging with the code I used to hack the rover. Yay, I get to stare at pieces of code I barely understand for hours!

 

**…**

 

“This whiteout is driving me crazy,” Venkat Kopoor sipped his coffee as he glanced over the most recent orbital path projection, which resulted in the whiteout ending in almost two weeks. “We just contacted him, and now we think we’re ignoring him. We can’t even get satellite pictures of the HAB to see what the hell he’s doing!”

 

“The press is insane too. They keep asking me personally for a solution, like I’m the one that personally caused the blackout in the first place.” Annie complained, finishing up her email and clicking send before slumping back in her seat.

 

“Whiteout. Not blackout.”

 

“Whatever, the press is still crawling up my ass. They think it’s dumb that we were so concentrated on bringing Watney home that we couldn’t see the blackout coming until it hit us in the face.”

 

“It was pretty shitty on our part.”

 

Annie rubbed her forehead. ”I’m getting more coffee. You want anything?”

 

“A diet coke.”

 

Annie rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything. Venkat barely had a moment to himself before one of the JPL programmers knocked on the open doorframe.

 

“Jack,” Venkat greeted. “What can I do for you?”

 

“We were thinking,” Jack begun. “This whiteout isn’t effecting the Hermes crew at all. They’re out of the path of solar radiation. But they’re also only seventy-three million kilometers away from Mars right now. We could relay the messages through Hermes and communicate though-’

 

“Out of the question,” Venkat said. “The crew still doesn’t know.”

 

“Damnit man, why can’t you tell them? Watney’s probably going crazy without communication.”

 

“And that’s exactly why. He thinks that we abandoned him, again, and hearing us though a crew that left him behind on a desert planet might prompt him to say stuff he doesn’t mean. Plus, they’re statistically in more danger then Watney is. They’re in space, he’s on a planet with food.”

 

“Then we’ll wait this one out?”

 

“We’ll have to.”

 

**Log Entry: Sol 108 (a)**

 

I’ve read through all the databases for communication and I think I figured out the problem.

 

It’s a little thing, barely a footnote in the databases but that’s because it wasn’t supposed to happen for our mission. Or during any mission. NASA plans these things carefully.

 

A whiteout last occurred to the MOM (Mars Orbital Spacecraft) spacecraft back in 201, nearly thirty years ago. Other whiteouts have occurred since then, but none that lasted as long or actually corresponded with missions or rovers. 

 

A whiteout is when Earth is between the sun and Mars, and Earth has an active magnetic field. Meanwhile, Mars does not. Scientists aren’t a hundred percent sure why, but it probably has something to do with the frozen core. 

 

So the sun is throwing a lot of radiation at Earth, which is deflecting it amazingly well. But all that extra radiation is hitting Mars over and over, actually thinning the atmosphere at a small rate. It’s so small of a difference that it doesn’t effect me much, but it does disrupt communications.

 

It takes eleven light minutes for my emails to get to Earth, and another eleven minutes for them to respond. But this radiation is blowing my tiny little emails off into deep space, never to get picked up by Earth.

 

Shit.

 

**Log Entry: Sol 108 (b)**

 

I’m not actually as fucked as I first thought I was!

 

Reading over what (very little) information on whiteouts, it’s not that bad. I’ll have to not take as much EVAs as I’ve been doing the past few sols due to the slight excess radiation,, but no lost there. I just have to go out there every couple sols to clean off the solar array.

 

NASA’s last message was six sols ago. Average whiteouts last about ten sols, but longer ones can last for sixteen. Either way, it’s only a few days of communication, and I’ve been doing fine.

 

In the meantime, I’ve been preparing for the second harvest. Wish I had suspenders and a straw hat!

 

You know how NASA sent me seeds, but grasses and ferns? I almost dumped them because they were useless, but decided against it and put it in my personal storage. Glad I didn’t, because I need something to distract me while I’m stressing, and you can only play Leather Goddesses of Phobos so many times (thanks Johanssen!)

 

I went through everyone’s personal items. I know, I know, i’m a nosy guy, but hey if they didn’t want me going though their stuff they shouldn’t have left me on a desolate planet!   
  


Just playing guys. There’s a good chance they could read this one day.

 

What I really want to do now is grow a bunch of grasses. The grass they sent up here with us is long and sturdy, much like weeds. Why, you ask?

 

Well, Vogel has an entire college course on Nigerian Basket Weaving. This man is a mystery.

 

I’m gonna weave some baskets with fresh, home grown martian grass!

 

**Log Entry: Sol 117**

 

Fuck baskets. Eating grass is a way better use of my time. Munch munch!

 

Also the whiteout is over. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Mark Watney had sealed the potatoes in airlock two and three, and only blew up the ones in the Hab.

 

**Audio Log Transcript: Sol 119**

Fuck! Fuck this! Fuck this airlock, fuck the Hab, fuck this entire goddamned planet! I’m running out of air and fuck it if I’m going to spend my last hour alive playing Mars’s little game. I’m so sick of it I could puke!

Might just puke actually. The explosion threw me pretty far and pretty fast. Fuck! I’ve fucking had it!

**Log Entry: Sol 120**

I have a hell of a backache. But good news! I’m alive and in the goddamned rover.

Things didn’t go as planned, but I’m not dead so it's a win all around. The Hab blew a lot of shit around, me included. It was hard to see too, my faceplate was covered by duct tape but I did grab Martinez's suit in time.

The potatoes are dead. Not all of them, I sealed off airlock three and two and backlogged the airlock with carbon dioxide and oxygen too see if they would grow better. I mostly used airlock one to go outside anyway because it was closer to the rover charging station.

But the ones in the Hab are dead. I can still eat the greens and the potatoes themselves, but it’ll cut into my food supply. I could microwave the potatoes so they’ll be more like mush and individually package them, but that won't increase my calorie count enough to compensate for the loss of nearly a thousand potato plants. I also can't eat the greens often, because if I eat too many I’ll position myself.

That’s actually not a bad idea if anything else goes wrong. But there’s enough morphine in the medical supplies to solve that problem.

It’s like the pathfinder trip all over again. I’ll spend the night in the rover before fixing up the Hab tomorrow morning. I’m still shaken up over being blasted meters away from the Hab.

_JPL [12:46 am]:_ You did what?!  
 _RVR [1:37 am]_ : I still have potatoes in airlock 2 and 3, so I won't starve yet. I’ll resoil them into the Hab once I get it pressured, keeping backups in airlock 3. If the Hab blows again, I’ll still have potatoes.   
_JPL [2:18 am]:_ Save the dead potato plants and store them outside, separate from the potatoes. We’ll ask our food experts to develop a way for you to eat those safely. Use Hab canvas to cover the hole in airlock one with resin. We’ll give you an estimate on how this loss will cut into your supply.  
 _RVR [2:56 am]:_ Duh. Tell me when you found me a way to not starve.

**Log Entry: Sol 121**

Sealing the hole was easy. I suited up and took some spare Hab canvas and a bit of spot-and-seal resin, and smeared a packet on the rim of the door before pressing the sheet to it. After I pressed it on the first time, I just took more resin and repeated the process until I had an airtight seal.

I then pressurized the Hab to one fifth an atmosphere to see if it could hold it. When nothing changed, I kept adding atmosphere until it was safe to take off my EVA suit.

Then came the wonderful process of taking my dead potato plants and storing them, before moving the ones out of airlock two and into the Hab. The ones in airlock three will mostly stay where they are, but reseeds of them will go in the Hab. I’ll be using airlock two to do EVAs.

I have around fifty healthy potato plants, but the plants that got killed neared was close to three hundred and fifty. You can’t fit many potatoes in the airlock, but I wanted the extra room. I now have three hundred and fifty dead potato greens I can eat once a week, with each plant averaging at around five potatoes. I now have 1750 dead potatoes, and 250 live ones I can move to the hab.

The rations will last me until Sol 400, and if I start eating potatoes then it’ll last me another 175, because each potato is 150 calories each and I need ten a day to meat my calorie count (haha, meat? Get it? I need meat. Please. I’m literally starving). If I start replanting now I could stretch that number, but this really cut into my potatoes I was planning to grow.

The potatoes will last me to around Sol 750 until this dirt is so deprived of nutrients that I can’t grow anything in it anymore. That’ll probably give me a couple extra hundred potatoes but not much. Keeping in mind a hundred potatoes lasts me ten Sols.

By Sol 856 I’ll either be dead or about to die of starvation and in no condition to drive all the way to the Ares 4 site.

** Log Entry: Sol 122 (a) **

  
I’ve stored the greens outside for now, but I’ve been microwaving potatoes and sealing them in plastic bags with a little bit of salt and pepper to store outside.

Why microwave them? Well, there’s plenty of reasons! First, microwaving them breaks down the proteins, which makes them easier to digest. It actually adds a few extra calories to my diet! Plus, have you ever tried to eat a raw potato? Disgusting.

NASA is also ordering a canvas test. Yay, I get to stare at walls for hours!

**Log Entry: Sol 122 (b)**

Urgh, I think I pulled something in my back. After hitting the wall of the airlock a day ago and bending over reseeding potatoes yesterday and then bending over some more to stare at canvas walls made my body say “That’s enough, Mark! Take a fucking break!”

So I’m in bed, heated potato on my back to act as a heat pack, when an idea struck me.

Airlock one is useless right now. But if I fix it up and hook it up to an airline, it’ll still hold an atmosphere. I won't be able to reattach it to the hole in the wall because there’s resin there now, but I could use it for something.

Not quite sure what yet. Maybe the potatoes and the greens? I won’t have to fill it to an atmosphere, but it would keep my yard tidy. Or maybe a shed to house tools, or take apart the panels to build something that’ll protect pathfinder from future damage?

In the end I’ll probably scavenge it for parts. But maybe NASA has a plan for it if I bring it up to them!

In other news, The Brady Bunch is such a pointless show. Also, how the fuck did those parents get such a good house with three kids each and those jobs, and a nanny? In this economy? I think not.

My potato heater is getting cold. I’ll warm up another one and throw this one in a bag. Thank god for martian grown potatoes to sooth my aching joints.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Death: 750 potatoes   
> Mark Watney: 50 potatoes 
> 
> Any questions will be answered in the comments
> 
> please leave a comment or kudo if you enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Score  
> Death: 0  
> Mark Watney: 1
> 
> any questions will be answered in the comments


End file.
